Sunday, September 03, 2017

Deadline?

“In a potential death knell for efforts to repeal Obamacare -- at least this year -- the Senate parliamentarian has ruled that Republicans face a Sept. 30 deadline to kill or overhaul the law with only 50 votes... In search of a badly needed legislative victory, McConnell and other Senate Republicans have shifted their focus instead to tax reform. Yet President Donald Trump -- who has repeatedly predicted Obamacare is about to implode -- has called for another repeal vote in the Senate, as have GOP conservative hard-liners in both the House and Senate.”

There is no respect for norms to keep McConnell from replacing this parliamentarian with a more congenial one (sure, it would be "shocking" and scarcely precedented, but McConnell is a flagrant serial disruptor of such norms -- Gorsuch, anyone?), so I cannot draw much comfort from this deadline, though we must all take our minor and provisional victories where we can in the face of Trump/Republican bigot idiot greedhead authoritarianism. If McConnell abides by this recommendation I can only assume it is because he wants an excuse to take the healthcare repeal debacle off the board for now.